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Monday, October 31, 2016

Andrea Brady was ill (get well!) and the other organisers were unavoidably elsewhere (come back!). Storm felt full. There
were a lot of people who hadn’t been there before. (Two new email addresses for
our list.)

And then, to finish, 'Nonofesto' by Trine Krugelund. These are two fictional poets from the EUOIA (see here and here) that I am thinking of developing for part three of my fictional poet project.

Patricia Farrell read new work, James Byrne read from his two latest books (he’d been in the room
when I phoned Patricia, so had preparation time) and Tim Allen, who read from a book provided by me minutes before he read. Good sports all.

It was a first half of ‘slight returns’, I explained, people who had
already read at Storm.

Yvonne Reddick read well in the second half.She is a poet and academic researcher. She was a Wordsworth Trust mentee in
2014 and won a Northern Writer’s Award in 2016. She has published
poetry pamphlets with Seapressed and with Knives, Forks and Spoons
Press. Her collaborative art and poetry exhibition Deerhart has toured to galleries in Cambridge and Preston, and will travel to Edinburgh in late 2017. See Yvonnereddick.net

Off to the Belve. Beer. Oblivion. Bossa Nova.

Coming soon to the room you can see above the front door in the photo above: Linda Stupart and Allen Fisher on Friday 25th November.

Thursday, October 27, 2016

I’m pleased to say the first eight of my latest ‘Empty
Diaries’ have appeared in The Literateur.
Find them here or here. Thanks editor Adam Crothers. ‘Wiped Weblogs’ are eight of 14 ‘sonnets’ that continue
the series of ‘Empty Diary’ poems that runs through Twentieth Century Blues,1901-2000
(though there is a science fiction 2055 poem and I have recently written
an‘Empty Diary 1327’ for the Petrarch poems; see here): this group features the years
2001-2014 (but I have written a 2015 and 2016 since). The rest of the 'Wiped Weblogs' (2009-14) may be read here.

It’s a sequence dealing with sexual politics, generally
narrated from the point of view of a woman. These recent ones use a lot of
internet flarf and detritus, combined with references to the first recorded uses of various
technologies (and their jargons, like ‘selfies’) and first uses of various sexual practices
(and their jargons, e.g., ‘pegging’). I see them as a sort of egregious Tom and Jerry sequence with
several characters (like Fuckeye and Stonehead) running through them. Everything gets
excessive, even the line-lengths.

They might form parts of the book of sonnets I’m writing.
Here’s an Empty Diary from ‘Twentieth
Century Blues’, one that didn’t get into History or Sleep(which carries a succinct excerpt from them).

Sunday, October 23, 2016

Each year since 2009 Bluecoat has staged a celebration of the life and work of Wirral-born writer Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957), famous for his influential 1947 novel, Under the Volcano.

The Lowry Lounge took place
on Saturday 22nd October this year at the arts centre and included a guided tour of Liverpool
city centre, a book launch, talks, readings, (drinks), and a film.

Lowry's passport shot

The central character of Under the Volcano is a drunken British
consul in Mexico on the eve of the Second World War, roaming the
streets of a fictional Cuernavaca during the Day of the Dead, and this
year’s Lounge adopts a consular theme.

In 1927, the year of Lowry’s first sea voyage as a young deck hand bound
for China, Liverpool had 43 foreign consulates, including Argentina,
Austria, Brazil, Colombia, Italy, Germany, Nicaragua, Norway and the
United States – most of them now gone, but not all, as I pointed out in my piece.

New Brighton-based Lowry expert, Colin Dilnot, started the Lounge by leading a walking tour of these ‘lost’
consulates, stopping at each site to reveal their relevance to Lowry and
for Helen Tookey to read short extracts from his work. We also had a British passport stamped by Bryan Biggs at each stop. (Lowry walks are always lucky with the autumn weather: bright. sunny, nicely chilly.) Colin excelled himself taking us around the consular sights. Perhaps the most directly relevant to Lowry (or to our re-readings of Lowry in an increasingly political way) refers to Firmin's captaincy of a Q Boat, an armed naval vessel camouflaged as a merchant ship, in World War One. Were German sailors boiled alive in their U-Boat's boilers, deliberately? Firmin looks less self-pitying in that light, more culpable. Certainly at least one American sailor spilled the beans to his consul in Liverpool and we stood outside the consular site in Water Street to contemplate this.

The day continued at Bluecoat with talks and readings on this consular theme. It was largely a showcase for the Firminists. Liverpool-based poets Helen Tookey and Robert Sheppard read Lowry-derived poems to kick the afternoon off. I was first on. This is what I said and read:

I’m going to read my short poem ‘The Lowry Lounge’, one of
my ‘Twelves’, 12 line poems, which was published in The Wolf magazine. The Lowry Lounge is of course the name of the
annual Bluecoat celebrations of Malcolm Lowry, loosely organised by a loose
group of Lowry activists and enthusiasts called The Firminists, named after Geoffrey Firmin,
the consul in Under the Volcano. It’s
also the name of a Vancouver
bar, and Bryan Biggs, the unwobbling pivot of the Firminists, chose it as a suitable
name for these days. My poem was a birthday poem for Bryan, and it seemed that out of all the
poetic foci one could adopt for the occasion – obscure British blues bands of
the 1960s, for example, or Jack Bruce [Bryan had just played Bruce's 'The Consul at Midnight' about the book] – a Lowry homage seemed the most apposite. I’ve wanted
to read it at previous Lounges, but it never seemed to fit. And I’m glad I
didn’t, since it involves the theme we have chosen for today: the consul, that
peculiar and often underemployed and part time job as a representative for home
governments abroad, often in cities away from the capitals, which is where the
ambassadors commonly reside. To be rude, consuls are often amateur ambassadors.
Holbein’s famous portrait is not called ‘The Consuls’. [a slow burning joke, that one!]

I didn’t want to write about Geoffrey Firmin and I only
allude to Under the Volcano. I wanted
to place my consul in the Smithdown
Road or overlooking the Docks, but he shares some
features with Firmin, and with other Lowry figures (a Manx connection,
including with its beer, Okells) but he also took on aspects of the only consul I have ever met.

This real consul was (maybe still is) consul for one of the
poorest nations on earth, and he ran a Liverpool
restaurant which ironically purveyed the cuisine of that nation’s former colonial
power. It was very good, if old-fashioned; in one corner was an office area,
where consular work was undertaken. I couldn’t imagine very much work, but he
was there if needed. The consul seemed a rather regal figure, accrued respect
from those around him. He limped dramatically and that seemed somehow romantic.
There was a bad portrait of him fishing … in the Mersey.
He isn’t really the consul in the poem. (It strikes me he deserves his own poem,
if only I were a different kind of poet.)

When the restaurant was destroyed by fire, the consul moved
and it was some months before I bumped into him, in a pub, sat at the bar, as at
a desk. He muttered something like, ‘I shouldn’t really be doing this here,’
laughed, and trousered what looked like passports and official documents. I’ve
never seen him since.

But he breathed real life into what might otherwise have
been either a stiff or limp Lowryesque puppet. (The barman’s real too: for him
it is the Day of the Dead every day!) Despite the smooth surface – what else
for Bryan? – this
poem, like nearly all my poems, is a collage, formally speaking.

The Lowry Lounge

The Consul shuffles passports on the bar tabletop,

beer-mat blotters, varnish thick enough to coat

Irish Sea decks. Shutters
slam as wind rises

across the dunes, the gull-tormented sand. His

Manx legs spin, as he stumbles, after sinking Okells,

wooden piers rotting into the empty river. A humped

wisp on the skyline whips up volcanian cloud. The

mouths of empty bottles whisper on the doorstep:

a tug pulls a ghost ship into Birkenhead.
Once

outside, the Consul brushes smuts from his starched

flannels; inside, the barman with the skeleton grin

tweezers nobody’s sodden visa into the rubbish.

Mark Goodall from University of Bradford spoke of 'The Consul', Ralph Rumney.Great stuff on an interesting and neglected artist and member of the Situationists. Canadian publisher Ottawa University Press has an ongoing series of Lowry-related books and Bluecoat hosted the European launch of its new volume of essays, Malcolm Lowry’s Poetics of Space, including talks from two of the book’s authors, Mark Goodall and locally-based short story writer Ailsa Cox, and another unscheduled contributor (Michael?), mainly about the Vancouver conference the book grew out of, and a little about our collective project to bring Lowry home to Liverpool and the Wirral. We saw some footage of the conference, and the Dollarton littoral.

The Lounge finished with a toast of mescal to Lowry and a screening of one of his favourite films, Mad Love (1935) - the American horror adaptation of Maurice Renard's story The Hands of Orlac - directed by Karl Freund and starring Peter Lorre. This was a wonderful film, cinematically superior, but script and plot-wise as ridiculous as Lowry said it was! Peter Lorre (Lowry!) was magnificent.

I've written about previous years' Lounges here, 2009, 2012 and (with lots of pictures) 2014, when Iain Sinclair joined us. Do have a look at those posts if you weren't there - or even if you were.

This year was homely and intimate (one regular couple made us all Day of the Dead related presents to celebrate their return to Texas). Helen, Mark and Bryan were good company with Patricia and me later. Patricia concluded the day was 'bonkers fun'. 'In a good way,' as people say these days.

Next year is a BIG year. With a conference in JULY and an early Lounge. See here.

Saturday, October 22, 2016

History or Sleep: Selected Poems was published a year ago today. There have been some good reviews, and you can read more about the book and can purchase it via the links here and here. It is the place to start to get to know my work if you don't already.There are links to the online reviews here.

Sunday, October 16, 2016

There is a second review on Stride of History or Sleep here. (Previous online reviews, including the first, can be accessed here). The first was positive; the second, by Anna Cathenka, is not, though that's not the problem. It is fixated upon the cover (which she finds repulsive) and the first poem in the book. There's a quote from a poem of 1988. (Which leaves approximately 30 years of work and change unaccounted for.)

Poem one, the recently recovered 'Round Midnight', is referred to a lot by Cathenka, and, by chance, I have posted it here, so it might be of use in reading her review. (She obviously doesn't like jazz, but 'pricking' is a musical term not a phallocentric neologism.)

Knowing that the author is a student of the subject I teach, it led me back to the 'FOOTNOTES' of these thoughts about the possibly premature professionalisation of our students, here. An effect, though I don't say so there, of what is unhumourously referred to as the 'employment agenda'. (The two words are always twinned as though they topple in their separate states.)

Thursday, October 13, 2016

Three of my 'Microbius' twittersonnets have been published in Issue 12
of Noon: journal of the short poem, ‘hammerhead’, ‘lucretius’ and ‘micrographia’.
They were written for the ‘Life is Short’ day at Bluecoat, Liverpool
in November 2015. (See here).

The ‘twittersonnet’ is a form supposedly devised by Rene Van
Valckenborch (actually, he devised the ‘twitterode’ first) and there are 100 of
them in A Translated Man (see here and
randomly here). These are all on display on Twitter. There is another in my forthcoming Pet 3. Here’s one that I may be dropping from that sequence (sorry
Kylie):

Sunday, October 09, 2016

Peter Hughes at 60 is celebrated in this anthology edited by Lynn Hughes. I don't know when he found out about the book, but I hope it was as much a surprise as An Educated Desire was for me last year. (See here.). And here is an account of the last time I saw Peter and Lynn at Leicester (contributors Nancy Gaffield, Simon Perril, Andrew Taylor and Alan Baker were all there too).

I have read the poems in it (not the prose by Lou Rowan yet!) and I particularly enjoyed poems especially written to or for Peter, such as those by Alan Baker, Nancy Gaffield, Anthony Mellors, Kelvin Corcoran, Emily Critchley, Johns Hall and James, and the Simons Perril and Smith.

I'm pleased to say I have a poem to (not for) Peter in the book, one that tries in its fourteen lines (it's another of the poems from It's Nothing (see here)) to get to the essence of Peter's writing, not just the Petrarch translations (which I write about here and here), but all of his work:

Fortuity I
endorse, the strong noun Peter Riley uses

of your patient projects and restless forms.

But my dictionary gives it a wide berth. It offers

‘fortuitism’ instead, another ismwe don’t need.

Of course, Peter Riley is represented here, as are many others I've not mentioned, ranging alphabetically from Tim Atkins at the beginning to Nigel Wheale at the end. It's great company to be in; the book features many of our best poets, dressed up for a birthday party. It's also the 100th book from Oystercatcher, Peter's enterprising press, though it is also credited as a 'Sea-pie Production' (which must be Lynn's moniker). See here. I suspect it'll be available soon.

Sunday, October 02, 2016

And finally we come to Chapter12: Form and the
Antagonisms of Reality: Barry MacSweeney’s Sin Signs

Many themes of the
book are summarized here, with reference to art works examined throughout. However,
the critical function of the work of art, the power that Marcuse and Adorno
discern in the literary work, is located in terms of form, forming, and
transformation. This function is born at the instant an artwork’s form de-forms
and re-forms in front of the reader. Earlier conjectures concerning the
cognitive aspects of form are re-engaged, and taken to reinforce this critical
function. The work of Barry MacSweeney, controversial for its extreme violence,
is read against the grain of its abject content, in terms of formal development
and its formal critical function. The aesthetic tradition’s concern with the
relationship of art to life is reinvestigated through the contemporary theory of
Jacques Rancière, as a series of positions, each taken up by different poets
examined in this study.

Saturday, October 01, 2016

Chapter 11: Geraldine Monk’s
Poetics and Performance: Catching Form in the Act

Monk’s poetics piece, Insubstantial
Thoughts on the Transubstantiation of the Text, traces the stages of
performative forming of a poetic text, from silent, solitary reading, through
the conventional poetry reading, to performance with others (including
musicians) in installation space. This is read both as a poetics piece and as a
formal demonstration of so-called ‘performance writing’. Monk’s recorded work
with composer Martin Archer is read in an immersive account of the forming
experience of listening to it. The author admits to the dangers of subjective
response, but nevertheless feels that this approach is necessary to determine
how a new ‘text’ (of all the performed elements) is formed.

My rambling readings of Monk may be accessed here. The chapter in the book is more concise account of both Monk's poetics and my account of forming her work in performance as I listened.

For those who can buy the book, or order it for libraries,
here are the places